Clocks and watches

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"Watches date from the early 1500s and were invented by the German locksmith and burgher Peter Henlein of Nuremberg.They were carried about in the hand. Up to the 1580s watches were made of iron, but gradually other metals were introduced such as brass & steel particularly after 1625.

The origins of a self winding wrist watch date from a patent granted in 1780 - though it wasn't invented until 1924. Electronic watches date from 1953.

The oldest known clock was built and erected in Milan in 1335, and the oldest English clock at Salisbury Cathedral in 1386. Domestic clocks were simply smaller versions of public clocks and came into fashion around 1500 with clocks designed by our old friend Peter Henlein which were driven by a spring. Furthermore you could carry the clocks anywhere so you could get a vague idea of the amount of time you were wasting wherever you did wander. All had hour hands and had no glass cover protecting the clock face. In fact, the time honoured excuse "Just a minute" wouldn't have made much sense prior to 1660 when the minute hands first made their entrance - no doubt to a very big hand indeed.

Pendulums became a feature of regular and accurate timekeeping in 1656 thanks to Christiaan Huygens. These pendulums were encased in wood and then mounted on walls. Soon after, the grandfather clock was born.

Rudimentary battery electric clocks were developed in 1840, and the first self contained battery-driven clock appeared in 1906. The development of quartz crystal by 1929 increased time keeping accuracy even further."

"He adored all clocks and watches. In the end there were no fewer than seven clocks in his bedroom (their ill-synchronized chiming drove his attendants mad), while another clock in the antechamber told not only the hour but also the direction of the wind. Hooke's balance-spring action was demonstrated in front of the King, while the royal accounts contain many items for the purchase of further clocks. The sun-dial (in the Privy Garden) had a particular function for the King used it to set his watch by."

Estimable entymologist Michael Quinion had this to say about the source of the word "watch" for a time-keeping device in his 30 March newsletter (yes, I'm that far behind on my reading):

Q. I was thinking about my wristwatch the other evening and started wondering why we call small timepieces watches. Is it because we look at them to tell the time, or were they originally intended to tell the watches of the night? I was tempted to give up on the question by saying that we call them watches because "forks" was already in use, but that lacked the intellectual satisfaction I have come to enjoy from your columns. [Fred Roth]

A. The watches of the night is pretty much bang on as an answer.

A watch related to people before it became a mechanical device. The job of the watch was - obviously enough - to watch, to stay alert during the night hours to keep guard and maintain order. It turned up especially in the phrase "watch and ward", as a legal term that summarised the duties of the watchmen - to keep watch and ward off trouble. Sailors' watches come from the same idea.

"Watch" started to be applied to clocks in the fifteenth century, in the first instance to a form of mechanical alarm, presumably either to wake the watchmen for their hours of duty, or to mark the passage of the hours of a watch.

By the latter part of the following century it had become applied to what we would now call a clock-face or dial (early mechanical clocks often lacked both a dial and hands, the time being told by bells, which explains the derivation of "clock" from the French "cloche", a bell; the first clock with a minute hand is recorded as late as 1475, which shows you how hard it was to make these early clocks keep reasonable time).

The first time "watch" is applied to a complete timekeeper, not just to an alarm bell, is in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost of 1588. Watches steadily became smaller in size down the centuries until they could be fitted into a pocket.

But it took until the end of the nineteenth century for them to be made small enough that they could be worn on the wrist and for the term "wrist watch" to be created as a term for them. At first they were a purely female accessory. A report in a Rhode Island paper in May 1888 remarked "I was not surprised to see that nearly all the fair sex were wearing the wrist watches which are now so entirely the fashion in London, but which I believe are very little worn as yet in America." They also became known as wristlet watches from about 1910. Men didn't regularly start to wear them until the 1920s, the associations of effeminacy only being dispelled as a result of soldiers and airmen finding them convenient during the First World War.